Page 50 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“How did you get this?” I ask.

“I’ve been watching Bogdan for longer than you might expect,” he says. “The wedding arrangement was never purely about alliance, at least not from my side. I had reasons for wanting proximity to his operation that had nothing to do with Pavlina or the Lyubimtsev name.” He holds my gaze without elaborating. “I don’t need to explain those reasons today. What matters is that I spent eight months with access I used.”

I look at him. He looks back.

“Why bring it to me?” I ask.

He’s quiet for a moment. Not evasive, not building to something, just the pause of a man choosing words with care.

“I stood at the front of that church,” he says, “and I watched a woman walk toward the altar like she was walking to her own execution. I’ve done a great many things in my life that I’ve made my peace with. I would not have made my peace with that.” He looks at the table for a moment, then back at me. “I would like to be able to sleep at night. That’s the whole of it.”

The room is quiet.

I look at him across the table, at the composed face, the folded hands, the man who walked out of his own wedding rather than participate in what it was, who spent eight months building proximity to an operation he was never aligned with, who showed up to this meeting alone with an address on a piece of paper and no ask attached to it.

I don’t have an immediate response to that level of candor. I’m not sure I’ve encountered it in a professional context before. In my world, everything has a price, visible or hidden. Gachev is offering something that reads as genuinely free. I don’t know how to respond to that.

He picks up on the silence without discomfort, stands, and straightens his jacket.

“I have no interest in what comes next,” he says. “The violence, the territory, the settling of accounts. None of that is mine, and I don’t want it.” He adjusts one cuff with a small automatic gesture. “But if Bogdan falls, certain arrangements become possible that currently aren’t.” He leaves it at that. It’s vague, but it gets enough points across for me to know that there’s a longer conversation available when the time is right for it.

He looks at me across the table. Not deferential, not a supplicant. Just a man who has done what he came to do and is now finished. He nods once, turns, and walks back through the door.

Misha waits until the sound of his footsteps has cleared the corridor, then comes in from the door, pours himself the coffee Gachev declined, and sits down in the chair Gachev just vacated.

“I like him,” Misha says.

I pick up the paper. Unfold it. The address is in the outer boroughs, east side, a residential street I know by name but not by property. It’s not the property we had circled, but the one next to it. Gachev’s information might’ve just saved our asses. The entry points are sketched in clean lines, the rotation schedule noted in the margin. The fixed guard position is marked with a cross. He’s been thorough. He was prepared to be doubted, but came anyway.

This morning, the operation was possible but not clean. Gachev’s intelligence has just made it clean.

I fold the paper and put it in my jacket pocket, next to the photograph I’ve been carrying since I took it off her desk three nights ago. The photograph of my wife and my son, face up now, always face up.

“Call Romeo,” I say. “I want eyes on that address within the hour.” I stand, pick up my coat. “And tell the crew we’re moving up the timeline.”

Misha takes out his phone without comment. That’s the whole of what needs to be said.

I walk out of the private room and through the restaurant and into the street, the paper in my pocket, the address in my head, the operation rearranging itself around new information, the way a good operation always does when the intelligence finally arrives.

Denis is in the outer boroughs.

I’m coming.

32

Pavlina

I tell myself I’ll wait.

I make it thirty minutes.

The note Slava left on the table says he’ll be back by noon. It’s ten past eleven. I’m standing in the kitchen with my father’s words running on a loop, Denis is fine, he’s been asking for you, he’s a patient child. I’m looking at the maps on the table, the circled properties, the contingency columns, and I’m thinking about a two-year-old boy in a house I don’t know the address of, waiting at a window for a car that hasn’t come in ten days.

I pick up my phone.

My father answers on the second ring.

“I want to see Denis,” I say. “Today. Now.”